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Properties and Kinds of Tropes: New
Linguistic Facts and Old Philosophical
Insights
Friederike Moltmann
Terms like ‘wisdom’ monly held to refer to abstract objects that are proper-
ties. On the basis of a greater range of linguistic data and with the support of some
ancient and medieval philosophical views, I argue that such terms do not stand for
objects, but rather for kinds of tropes, entities that do not have the status of objects,
but only play a role as semantic values of terms and as arguments of predicates. Such
‘non-objects’ crucially differ from objects in that they are not potential bearers of
properties.
1. Introduction
The idea that properties should be conceived as genuine objects in their
own right has been a controversial doctrine throughout the history of
philosophy. But it has been much less controversial to assume that nat-
ural languages provide us with an easy way for referring to properties,
or at least seemingly so to refer. Any property expressed by a predicate
can, it appears, in principle act as the referent of a corresponding nom-
inalization. Thus, wise, expressing the property of being wise, allows for
the nominalization wisdom, which seems to act as a term referring to
that same property, allowing for second-order predicates to apply (as in
wisdom is rare). In the context of natural language, therefore, properties
apparently can act not only as possible meanings of predicates, but also
as genuine objects, namely when they are referred to by a nominaliza-
tion of a predicate.
In this paper, I will question this generally accepted view, that is, that
terms like wisdom stand for objects that are properties and argue that
nominalizations exhibit a rather different kind of ontology than the
ontology of abstract objects generally attributed to them. Rather than
standing for a ‘property object’, wisdom, I will argue, stands for